Writer's Discipline Quotes

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.

I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.

Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.

Talk isn't work. Work is when you have pages in the evening that you didn't have in the morning.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning.

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn’t hesitate to do so.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

I think the computer is a hindrance to good writing because it is so tempting to leave what you've written. If you use a typewriter, you must retype if you make a mistake, and thus, you must re-examine every word.

I'm not a speed writer. I write slowly and revise obsessively. The end result tends to be good. That's where my strength is.

I won't leave any unfinished manuscripts.

I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.

When I am writing a novel, though, then it's usually three or four hours a day. Ideally, right after lunch until three or four, but sometimes picking up again around ten, going until a touch after midnight. I rarely write in the morning, unless I'm on deadline. I do like rewriting in the morning, though. Guess it's the way my brain's put together. Or, the way it's falling apart.

I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, 'This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,' you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

I haven't got a writer's discipline.

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.